"No."
"Somebody called the house. That Monday night. Florine answered. A woman. She said she was from the company, she said she was so sorry, she said she just wanted us to know he wasn't in any pain. That he went quick. Florine held on to that." The numbers above the door went eleven, twelve. "Was that you?"
"No, Mr. Varnum. That wasn't me."
"Good," he said. "Because it wasn't true, was it."
She didn't answer. Fifteen. Sixteen. She thought of fourteen, four times in a minute and a half, and she did not know how to answer, and he seemed to understand that the not answering was the answer, and his jaw moved once, as if he had bitten down on something hard.
Twenty-two had been her floor since 2012. The Security Operations Center sat behind a glass wall on the north side, two operators at a curved console in front of monitors showing camera views of Stanhope's buildings in Hartford, Windsor, Charlotte, and Phoenix; along the south windows ran a row of offices along the south windows looking out over the Bushnell Park carousel and the gold dome of the Capitol. Her office was the third one. Or had been. The nameplate beside the door had been removed, leaving four small screw holes and a rectangle of paint a shade brighter than the wall around it, and taped to the glass at eye level was a sheet of printer paper that said ARDENT — SITE LEAD in a font with serifs, as if serifs made it permanent.
Inside, everything she owned had been put into three cardboard file boxes with lids, stacked on the guest chair. Someone had been careful. Her framed photo of Zofia at six with a gap-toothed grin and a soccer ball was on top of the first box, face up, wrapped in a sheet of bubble wrap secured with a single neat piece of tape. The desk had been wiped down, and there was a laptop on it that was not hers, with a sticker on its lid of a red shield and the word ARDENT, and beside it a half-eaten bagel on a paper towel.
The bagel's owner came in behind them a moment later, holding a coffee, and stopped dead.
"Agata."
"Hi, Kiran."